China “sending wrong item” scam

Starsky72
Contributor
Contributor

So....

 

1) item advertised on Facebook

2) You buy two of them, pay via PayPal $29.90

3) Item arrives, nothing like as described and is damaged

4) Seller offers small percentage as refund, I refuse.

5) Escalate the complaint in Paypal

5) PayPal state I need to send back, tracked, and the seller has to confirm delivery before a refund will be issued, before 4 January

6) Tracked postage costs more than I’d get in a refund

7) Seller wins..

 

I end up out of pocket with a broken item that is different in every way (size, materials, quality) from what I ordere, plus I ordered two and didn’t receive them

 

Paypal are allowing this scam to happen.  I should have lied and simply said I never eeceived it

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171 REPLIES 171

CatGoodwin
Contributor
Contributor

My claim didn't even allow time for the return to arrive. There is no way I can ship something from northern Maine to China in less than two weeks. Notified on 9/15/20 - must be RECEIVED by 9/24/20. Not possible, therefore guaranteeing that I can't get any sort of resolution. Such bull. 

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HammYY
Contributor
Contributor
My return to China only took 4 days. It did take 12 weeks to arrive, presumably to allow the scam to be more effective. Register for Paypal's "return shipping on us", return the item and claim return postage costs from Paypal. Then hopefully your dispute ends in your favour.
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Tomred0_3
Contributor
Contributor
Snap - exactly the same for me. Item received was not what I paid for. Cheap item arrived in a padded envelope with no accompanying documents. To make it worse the seller was negotiating with me and PayPal at the same time. Was given 10 days to return item - which by the way the seller made a point of telling me, was at my own expense. Scam being perpetuated by PayPal
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Temp20201130b
Contributor
Contributor

I agree 100%. PayPal is complicit in this. I’m disgusted that they side with the fraudsters. I’ll never use PayPal again. They are on a par with the fraudsters.

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Jjmash
Member
Member
I also had this problem, I found out too late as I ordered more than 5 orders from China, mostly thru facebook ads and all via paypal. My friend just told me he had similar experiences and that prompted me to search for this article. Ebay orders at same period from China had no problems. Don't trust facebook ads, don't trust paypal for future orders, because all they need is a shipping confirmation from sender, don't care if you receive the merchandise or not. PayPal, no good.
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Temp20201130b
Contributor
Contributor

I’m done with PayPal. They side with known fraudsters. 

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Chemdave
Member
Member
I bought an $80 pool and recieved a $10 pool. $200 return shipping. Paypal just enabled. Luckily, the company I bought it from claimed a false Thedford Nebraska address that I could demand to send it to or the california address that it was sent from. Filing BBB complaint and launching an IC3 investigation against the company and paypal worked well. Sending that documentation to paypal got my case elevated to the "back office" and I was awarded a full refund and got to keep the item sent, even though it was worthless to me. Furthermore, the companys website was shut down within a couple of weeks. File an ic3 report to get these scams stopped!
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DF35
Contributor
Contributor
I am going through this same scenario right now. I know this scam exists so I’m careful about not purchasing anything from China, problem is their marketing ads and videos are not transparent as to where the seller is located. They intentionally give the impression they are US based.
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mj_
Contributor
Contributor

Another caught in the same scam, only approach I can think of is to stop using Paypal.

 

Paypal are not interested in protecting against this, the scammers clearly know how to cheat the system to answer the questions as needed.  Make the resolution difficult from our side and deliver a poor product badged up as what you ordered.

 

Paypal, are powerless, or actively encouraging this, not sure right now but there are a lot of comments in this thread for it not to be something they couldn't be doing something about.

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boler4
Contributor
Contributor
PayPal has resolved my case and ruled in my favor. China has this scam going where they send the wrong item and use the tracking number to say the package was received. Take a photo of what you receive and a photo of what you ordered.
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